This is true, it was a big cultural moment, but the level to which they sold the absolute heck out of that film should not be understated. It was one of the first times I can clearly remember where a film came along at roughly the same time as all the secondary IP like games and merch, and seemingly more and more kept coming. Another film from around that time which had a similar media blitz was Alien 3, released the year after.
Disappointed this only focuses on the contemporary technology used in making the (admittedly amazing) visual effects for the film, which has been addressed multiple times across various formats. When I first watched T2 as a kid the thing which grabbed me more was that gadget John Connor uses to hack the ATM and all the cool stuff in the Cyberdyne offices. It would be nice if someone wrote an article discussing that aspect of the film, for the record and posterity's sake.
>it's a fun toy, but I wouldn't depend on it for anything important.
This could be said for the rail network as a whole.
Neglect and underinvestment over the last 60+ years has left it in a sorry state, and debacles such as HS2 show how government has no ability to deliver proper material upgrades to the ageing infrastructure and service. The direction of travel (scuse the pun) has been clear since the Beeching cuts: roads are the priority. Add to that Neoliberal divestment policies and we end up where we are today: overcrowded, filthy, ugly trains barely fit for cattle transport and chronically understaffed stations and train crews. Not to mention the extortionate prices for a ticket to travel on the network.
I adore rail travel, but dread the necessity of using it any time I go on a journey.
It took me a long time to understand why colon wasn't a valid character for file names on Mac and I still find the colon separator to be the least visible these days. Finder can display paths with the forward slash separator (defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES), and yet forward slash may be used in a file name created through Finder as noted in the post, while colon cannot (which is not addressed), but creating a file in the terminal named with a colon is possible and the shell will escape it correctly in use. This file then shows up with a slash in place of the colon when viewed in Finder, and conversely the file with a slash in the name shows up in Terminal with a colon!
>the government doesn't like the idea of displaying an official page stating that you are not allowed to see something
They don't even have to do that, the connection can just be left to time out on the client side. This is what they did (and some ISPs still do) for the Internet Archive...
Yes, archive.org is classed as an adult site in the UK.
How long until we find out the politicians have written in an exemption for themselves and the security apparatus? I hope my pessimism is unwarranted in this case, but it certainly isn't unfounded.
Can your external place objects and route cables around on the patch? That's the main thrust of my original comment, which is that JS scripting can help avoid having to patch lots of objects together in the GUI. Live scripting music is beyond the scope of my advice.
Well, it's obviously not intended for realtime 'live coding', but as an answer to the problem of dealing with the GUI and manually cabling a patch up it suffices, though it does help to be fairly conversant with the basics of Max to begin with. For instance I've used JS to auto-populate a patch where the number of abstractions isn't known in advance and may need to change, with each abstraction then getting its own settings passed as generated arguments. It could be a nightmare cable spaghetti patch but JS made it end up very neat and tidy.
IMO there are far better options for realtime code-generated music. Max does what it does well, and shoehorning in interrupt level scheduling for scripting on top is out of scope for its remit.
>Ableton and Max are totally separate codebases, and "Max for Live" is just a ~VST interface between them.
This is not strictly true, and Max for Live (M4L) is much more than a pseudo-VST. In the context of Live, the Max runtime is controlled by the DAW, which itself then exposes part of its interface to Max. So there's realtime bi-directional communication going on, more akin to how Propellerhead Software's (now deprecated) ReWire protocol used to work, the host passing control information (transport position, note data, etc.) and audio buffers into the client software and vice-versa. There is some superficial similarity with VST in this sense, but with M4L it's much more deeply integrated into the DAW as a whole. The Live Object Model[1], while not complete, is extensive, and there is very little that is off-limits to a M4L device to manipulate, with the caveat that care must be taken to avoid overflow of the control stream coming back from Max into Live (certain operations must be placed in the low-priority scheduler thread).
This new API gives much of the same control that M4L already did, but without having to have Max involved.
>In Max, you have to build everything from scratch, every time.
Again, not strictly true. Editing a M4L device opens the full Max environment, which has a snippets[2] feature much like any other good IDE. You can easily build a large library of boilerplate code for your own specific purposes with it. There are also many basic examples included out of the box.
The visual patching part of Max makes sense when you know the history of the program. It was built for musicians working at the forefront of interfacing MIDI with the power of the more compact mainframe computers of the day (PDP-11 IIRC). The 'programming' was done through a GUI running on the first Macintosh. At first there was no audio processing in Max itself, it was purely for generating and manipulating MIDI data.
You can see this 'bare-bones' style of Max with Miller Puckette's continuation of his original work in Pure Data[1] (aka Pd). The nice thing about Pd is that it's open source, so all the scheduling and signal flow logic can be examined and understood. As I understand it, the basics of Pd are comparable to how Max still works under the hood, though no doubt there has been some deviation over the years.
As it is now, Max offers a very smooth interface to the basic paradigm that was established 40 years ago, with many modern advances, but the fundamental idea hasn't changed all that much since it first came out.
If you really hate having to work through a GUI for computer music there's always SuperCollider[2] and its many derivatives (Sonic Pi, TidalCycles, etc.). It's nice to have options!
Max itself can be manipulated through JavaScript. You can dynamically create and connect objects in it, set scheduler tasks, etc. Max goes a lot deeper than wiring some GUI boxes together.
This blog post is highlighting their specific contribution to the UK government's open consultation[1], not a general call for sanity. There's a link to their open letter at the end of the piece. No doubt they will write other authorities when the need arises.